Flickr Drops Support for Google's Picnik, IE7 and Firefox 3.6

Flickr has big plans this year, at least that's what it's saying in its "New Year's Cleaning" blog post. Big and wonderful new features are coming this year, but it's got to get rid of some of the older and rarely used ones first, it says.

Flickr has compiled a list of features that are getting the boot, it's nothing core to the site of course, but some users may be disappointed to see them go.

"In the coming weeks and months you will see significant updates to Flickr’s user experience, new features and offerings across devices," Flickr boasts.

"To do this, we are starting 2012 with a renewed sense of focus. This means discontinuing certain features that are not core to our product or that haven’t resonated with you," it said.

Flickr is dropping integration with the Picnik photo editor, now owned by Google. Picnik enables users to touch up their photos, add effects, resize them etc., all in the browser.

But Flickr says that it's working on bringing the same functionality itself, so there's no need for Picnik anymore. The fact that it's owned by Google probably doesn't help. The transition will happen over several months.

Photo Session, a feature it introduced only a few months ago, will be gone as well, shutting down on March 20. The feature enabled users to share photos and chat all without the need for any plugin. It hasn't been that popular, so it will be removed, but some of its features will live on in other parts of Flickr.

"Since the upcoming new experiences will either require, or work significantly better, with modern browsers, we will also discontinue supporting some of the older browsers that only a very small percentage of people are using with Flickr," Flickr explained.

Both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6 will no longer be supported by Flickr. Existing features will continue to work, but it won't be testing any of the new ones on the two browsers so there's no guarantee that they will work.

Also getting the boot is the Flickr Clock, FlickrAuth - the old authentication method for third-party apps, and support for Windows 7 Slate PCs.